Bittensor’s Gamma Tokens – Applied Interdependence

What makes a community flourish?

There’s no single answer, as no collection of people operates exactly alike. It becomes especially complex in a distributed community, where people band together across the globe, with wildly different life experiences, ideals and intentions.

It’s an especially pressing matter for Bittensor, where the network’s cornerstone belief is that success comes from aligning incentives. However, this is a deceptively nebulous statement, as the process of alignment is multi-layered and often requires precision. Anybody who has run a subnet before knows just how hard it is to balance motivations from multiple parties and trigger collaboration.

In a bid to initiate more connectivity in the space, Jacob Steeves (AKA Const) announced a new internal asset in the ecosystem: Gamma tokens. In rudimentary terms, these are tokens that allow subnets to purchase services from other subnets. Oftentimes, aligning incentives is thought of within individual subnets (such as finding the right architecture to benefit miners, validators, owners, and ultimately users), but Gamma tokens are about reaching across to others in the protocol.

They are primarily an inter-subnet tool, encouraging subnets to buy resources from each other. The ecosystem has developed across multiple vectors, far more than most blockchains – this is a method of nudging its parts to work together.

(Take a look here for in-depth discussion on the mechanics behind Gamma tokens.)

It asks builders to use SayGM or Chutes over OpenRouter (perhaps with some optimisation from Cacheon). Use Lium or Targon over RunPod or Vast.ai. If you need time series foundation models, there’s Cascade’s API. If you seek AI-assisted research without hallucinations, turn to Claims. You want a decision model? There’s a Jev alternative in the protocol.

Gamma tokens mark a moment of maturity within Bittensor. We often assess the growth of a blockchain by its asset price, user base, or influence, but this is a different marker – one that signals a focus towards forming internal bonds.

Note, this is not an argument to simply use the tools inside Bittensor purely because they are within Bittensor. While that argument could be made, it would be relatively vapid and circular in its thinking. There are benefits that come with inter-subnet relations that go far beyond this, and which cement why exactly this signifies a specific type of growth.

Mechanical vs Organic Solidarity

In his text The Division of Labour in Society, the sociologist Émile Durkheim speaks of two forms of connectivity within a community.

Mechanical solidarity: This is where people band together due to shared beliefs, activities, and often characteristics. Durkheim thought of it as mechanical in the scientific sense – molecules and other concepts in physics cohere because of their likeness and sameness, and the parts move only as the whole moves. Individuals in these communities are bound by what he called the collective conscience: the beliefs and sentiments that everyone holds in common. The people do not feel a specific need or desire to collaborate, but more so it feels as though there is something important about belonging. It is the lifeblood of tribalism, where people stick together because they are alike, rather than because they need each other.

Organic solidarity: This is where social cohesion is drawn from a division of labour, where specialised parts of the community are mutually interdependent and contribute distinct functions for each other. It happens because different people are proficient in different things, and need different things from each other.

Organic solidarity is thought of as being the more mature of the two, as it’s driven by active reasons for each participant to lean on each other, rather than the impression that sameness or likeness will lead to productivity. Where its mechanical counterpart emerges out of the likeness or sameness of different participants, the other emerges out of necessity.

In a hospital, this would manifest as people with specific roles helping to serve one another. Surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, pharmacists and porters do wildly different jobs, but none of them can do much without the others, and together they keep the whole place running. Because it is built on difference rather than sameness, this form of solidarity also has no need for everyone to be alike, and no need for an outsider to define itself against.

Durkheim also had a name for what happens when a community has divided its labour, but the relationships between its specialists haven’t caught up: anomie. The parts are specialised, yet they don’t coordinate, so instead of fitting together they act in isolation. It’s a fair description of where Bittensor sits today. The division of labour is undeniably there (just look at the list of subnets above), but the ties between them are still relatively thin. I’d argue that once dTAO was introduced, subnets began drifting apart as their focus lay with raising individual alpha price. Only in recent history has that altered.

What Bittensor is trying to do right now is a mixture of the two. It starts mechanically, in the most obvious way – Gamma tokens have been built in part to intentionally trigger collaboration. Const and the Opentensor Foundation are explicitly saying “look inwardly for your needs”. It’s a mission statement for subnet owners to look at their neighbours specifically because they are neighbours. They share likeness, and operate with a shared goal of seeing the network thrive.

Adopting Gamma tokens once they launch will be a statement in itself. Time and time again, acting on new features within the protocol is seen as a pro-Bittensor action (this is something we saw when Conviction was announced). That is mechanical solidarity in its purest form: a show of belonging.

Gamma tokens also add a second layer. As currently proposed, they allow subnet owners to allocate part of their miner emissions towards Gamma tokens, meaning it can be instigated on-chain. Plus the design includes an in-built function where buying Gamma burns some of your own alpha, which increases scarcity, and therefore theoretically improves price. It encourages alignment by adding financial benefits. That would never be enough for a subnet to choose another subnet over non-protocol alternatives, but it could act as the push to take the ecosystem’s actors more seriously.

That financial nudge isn’t exactly solidarity of either kind – it isn’t about likeness, and it isn’t about need; it’s about self-interest. Durkheim spent much of his work in The Division of Labour arguing against the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who believed society could be held together by self-interested contracts alone. Durkheim’s reply was that self-interest is too flimsy a glue, because the moment interests shift, the bond dissolves. If the incentives no longer align, then the initial contracts will not be adhered to. So the burn is better understood as a reason to make the first move than as a reason to stay.

What gives subnets a reason to stay is closer to organic solidarity. When Const announced Gamma tokens, he explicitly highlighted several subnets that already work together. He used OpenRoboto as an example, who use Engy for inference and Cacheon for their inference engines. In the future, there may be a time when the newly launched subnet Carbon uses OpenRoboto to engage with their physics AI research. That’s the sort of convergence that doesn’t need a token or a tool to find alignment; they simply band together regardless.

They don’t do this just because they’re part of Bittensor, or out of a sense that peers in the protocol deserve support. There is something specific a subnet gets when it works with another: precise and specialised customer support. Subnets are not easy to understand – only a tiny fraction of people in the world know how they work inside and out. If you’re a subnet that needs cloud compute, who is going to give you more hands-on support? RunPod or GreenCompute?

This is something Durkheim addressed when he spoke about the non-contractual element of contract: the idea that contractual relationships often fail to represent the full depth a relationship can have, and rely on norms and understanding that never make it onto the page. No subnet-to-subnet Gamma contract will include a clause about asking for specific Bittensor-focused support, but they will know that assistance is theoretically possible. And both sides will understand it even if they never actively say it or act on it.

This idea is echoed by the sociologist Mark Granovetter, who wrote about how each person’s responsibilities sit within their own contexts, and that the contexts of each actor influence the expectations placed upon them. He stated that economic action is embedded in ongoing social relationships, and those relationships are what generate trust, share information, and discourage bad behaviour.

Interdependence Within Bittensor

This raises a fair question: if organic solidarity can emerge on its own, what are Gamma tokens for? OpenRoboto, Engy and Cacheon show that the organic form is possible. Gamma is an attempt to make it the norm, lowering the friction so that more subnets discover what these few found by themselves.

That said, Gamma tokens do not inherently create an interdependent state between subnets – if the tools you need are being offered by a subnet that is poorly functioning, then you will still look elsewhere for a solution. However, they do encourage subnets to at least begin by looking at their peers first. The incentives function as a nudge rather than a bond. But if it works correctly, then those subnets who collaborate will find benefits that go far beyond the explicit economic upshot, and organic cohesion will emerge, where subnets operate in a state of symbiosis.

While many blockchain foundations act as their network’s dealmakers, chasing recognition from traditional centralised organisations, the Opentensor Foundation is focusing on what happens within. That isn’t Bittensor turning its back on the outside world, as its subnets do that work themselves: Score has a collaboration with PwC, ORO joined Y Combinator, Targon wrote a technical whitepaper with Intel, and the list goes on. What’s happening is closer to a division of labour of its own, where the subnets face outward and the foundation tends the ties between them.

In the preface to the second edition of The Division of Labour, Durkheim argued that a specialised society needs bodies whose job is coordination rather than production, to stop the division of labour from sliding into anomie. Gamma tokens look a lot like the foundation stepping into that role. There is an understanding that the protocol works best when it works together, and so Gamma tokens have been designed to initiate that.

This is a strikingly different form of flourishing, as it is not so much about cementing the network’s position outside or by trying to bring in new blood and resources from elsewhere, but rather triggering collaboration from within, so that whatever the network offers the world is built on parts that genuinely depend on each other. If a network is expected to survive for many years to come, it must learn to coordinate together. Gamma tokens appear as the training wheels to achieve it. And like any training wheels, the hope is that one day they won’t be needed.